Site Mobile Navigation

T. Keith Glennan, 89, First Chief of Space Agency

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

T. Keith Glennan, an educator who put together the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958 as its first leader, died today in Mitchellville, Md. He was 89.

The cause was complications from a stroke.

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower chose Dr. Glennan to head the nation's space agency, Government research in the field was conducted principally by laboratories of the armed services and the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. Under his direction these laboratories were combined to form NASA.

One of his first moves was to lure the German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun away from the Army, for whom he was building missiles, to work on space probes and other projects related to eventual space flight. "I sensed almost immediately that he wasn't interested in building missiles," Dr. Glennan said of the German scientist, "he was interested in going out in space."

Despite the urgency engendered in the United States by the Soviet Union's launching of the first orbiting satellite, Sputnik I, in 1957, Dr. Glennan was not enthusiastic about competing with the Russians. "I never thought of it as a race," he said later. "I was always convinced we would overtake the Soviets."

In the description of Dr. John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, Dr. Glennan was "a conservative visionary who shared with Eisenhower a distrust of large government and large organizations." His Government salary was $22,000.

More than two decades later, Dr. Glennan recalled the thrill he felt in 1961 when he heard President Eisenhower deliver his farewell address warning against America's growing "military-industrial complex." In 1987, when Dr. Glennan was asked to write a book, he said that were he up to it, he would "take on the management problems arising out of an overly aggressive Department of Defense and a greedy industrial community aided and abetted by scientists and technologists."

Under Dr. Glennan, NASA proposed a plan for a manned trip to the Moon sometime after 1970. Before the Kennedy Administration took over in 1961, he also "fought to keep NASA small," Dr. Logsdon said. President John F. Kennedy greatly expanded NASA and accelerated its schedule. The departing administrator considered this reckless.

Dr. Glennan wrote his successor, James Webb, of his doubts about a "race" against the Russians to the moon. "I don't think we should play the game according to the rules laid down by our adversary," he said.

Dr. Glennan had come to Washington from the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, where he was appointed president in 1947. Over the next 18 years of his tenure he was credited with building Case (now Case Western Reserve University) into one of the nation's top 20 technical institutions of higher learning.

He took a leave from Case in 1950 to serve at President Harry S. Truman's request as one of five commissioners of the Atomic Energy Commission for two years. The most significant issue before the commission was the development of the hydrogen bomb. He resigned on Oct. 30, 1952, and the next day the first bomb test took place in the Pacific.

After retirement from Case in 1966 he was the United States representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

Thomas Keith Glennan was born Sept. 8, 1905, in Enderlin, N.D. He attended Eau Claire State Teachers College in Wisconsin, then went on to Yale University, where he graduated in 1927 with a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering.

He spent most of the next 14 years working in the film industry in the United States and Britain. Later in Hollywood he was operations manager for Paramount Pictures and ultimately studio manager for Samuel Goldwyn Studios.

In 1942 he joined the Navy's Underwater Sound Laboratory in New London, Conn., where he soon became director. After the war he worked briefly for General Analine and Film Corporation in Binghamton, N.Y.

He is survived by his wife of 63 years, the former Ruth Haslup Adams; a son, Thomas K. Glennan Jr. of McLean, Va.; three daughters, Sally Oldham of McLean, the Rev. Catherine Borchert of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and Polly Watts of St. Thomas, V.I.; nine grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

A version of this obituary; biography appears in print on April 12, 1995, on Page B00012 of the National edition with the headline: T. Keith Glennan, 89, First Chief of Space Agency. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe